Viewers of TV dramas don’t focus on the technology behind how a forensics crime team tracks a terrorist or drug ring using cell phone data, but scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology do. NIST researchers have developed a new technique aimed at improving the validation of a crime lab’s cell phone forensics tools. Early experiments show promise for easier, faster and more rigorous assessments than with existing methods.

Cell phones reveal much about our daily communications—the who, when and what of our calls and texts. A small chip card within most phones, called an identity module, stores this and other data for a subscriber. A subscriber identity module (SIM) accommodates phonebook entries, recently dialed numbers, text messages and cellular carrier information. Forensic examiners use off-the-shelf software tools to extract the data, allowing them to “connect the dots” in a criminal case such as identifying affiliations or detecting mobile phone activity around the time of an event.

But for this information to be used as evidence in court or other formal proceedings, the software tools that forensic teams employ are normally validated to determine suitability for use. Currently, preparing test materials for assessing cell phone tools is labor intensive and may require learning new command languages to perform the process. Read the rest of this entry »